The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗

Rule—Ideal Must Not be Lowered—Life,

According to Christ’s Teaching, is Movement—The Ideal and the

Precepts—Second Misconception Shown in Replacing Love and

Service of God by Love and Service of Humanity—Men of Science

Imagine their Doctrine of Service of Humanity and Christianity

are Identical—Doctrine of Service of Humanity Based on Social

Conception of Life—Love for Humanity, Logically Deduced from

Love of Self, has No Meaning because Humanity is a Fiction—

Christian Love Deduced from Love of God, Finds its Object in

the whole World, not in Humanity Alone—Christianity Teaches

Man to Live in Accordance with his Divine Nature—It Shows that

the Essence of the Soul of Man is Love, and that his Happiness

Ensues from Love of God, whom he Recognizes as Love within

himself.

 

Now I will speak of the other view of Christianity which hinders

the true understanding of it—the scientific view.

 

Churchmen substitute for Christianity the version they have framed

of it for themselves, and this view of Christianity they regard as

the one infallibly true one.

 

Men of science regard as Christianity only the tenets held by the

different churches in the past and present; and finding that these

tenets have lost all the significance of Christianity, they accept

it as a religion which has outlived its age.

 

To see clearly how impossible it is to understand the Christian

teaching from such a point of view, one must form for oneself an

idea of the place actually held by religions in general, by the

Christian religion in particular, in the life of mankind, and of

the significance attributed to them by science.

 

Just as the individual man cannot live without having some theory

of the meaning of his life, and is always, though often

unconsciously, framing his conduct in accordance with the meaning

he attributes to his life, so too associations of men living in

similar conditions—nations—cannot but have theories of the

meaning of their associated life and conduct ensuing from those

theories. And as the individual man, when he attains a fresh

stage of growth, inevitably changes his philosophy of life, and

the grown-up man sees a different meaning in it from the child, so

too associations of men—nations—are bound to change their

philosophy of life and the conduct ensuing from their philosophy,

to correspond with their development.

 

The difference, as regards this, between the individual man and

humanity as a whole, lies in the fact that the individual, in

forming the view of life proper to the new period of life on which

he is entering and the conduct resulting from it, benefits by the

experience of men who have lived before him, who have already

passed through the stage of growth upon which he is entering. But

humanity cannot have this aid, because it is always moving along a

hitherto untrodden track, and has no one to ask how to understand

life, and to act in the conditions on which it is entering and

through which no one has ever passed before.

 

Nevertheless, just as a man with wife and children cannot continue

to look at life as he looked at it when he was a child, so too in

the face of the various changes that are taking place, the greater

density of population, the establishment of communication between

different peoples, the improvements of the methods of the struggle

with nature, and the accumulation of knowledge, humanity cannot

continue to look at life as of old, and it must frame a new

theory of life, from which conduct may follow adapted to the new

conditions on which it has entered and is entering.

 

To meet this need humanity has the special power of producing men

who give a new meaning to the whole of human life—a theory of

life from which follow new forms of activity quite different from

all preceding them. The formation of this philosophy of life

appropriate to humanity in the new conditions on which it is

entering, and of the practice resulting from it, is what is called

religion.

 

And therefore, in the first place, religion is not, as science

imagines, a manifestation which at one time corresponded with the

development of humanity, but is afterward outgrown by it. It is a

manifestation always inherent in the life of humanity, and is as

indispensable, as inherent in humanity at the present time as at

any other. Secondly, religion is always the theory of the

practice of the future and not of the past, and therefore it is

clear that investigation of past manifestations cannot in any case

grasp the essence of religion.

 

The essence of every religious teaching lies not in the desire for

a symbolic expression of the forces of nature, nor in the dread of

these forces, nor in the craving for the marvelous, nor in the

external forms in which it is manifested, as men of science

imagine; the essence of religion lies in the faculty of men of

foreseeing and pointing out the path of life along which humanity

must move in the discovery of a new theory of life, as a result of

which the whole future conduct of humanity is changed and

different from all that has been before.

 

This faculty of foreseeing the path along which humanity must

move, is common in a greater or less degree to all men. But in

all times there have been men in whom this faculty was especially

strong, and these men have given clear and definite expression to

what all men felt vaguely, and formed a new philosophy of life

from which new lines of action followed for hundreds and thousands

of years.

 

Of such philosophies of life we know three; two have already been

passed through by humanity, and the third is that we are passing

through now in Christianity. These philosophies of life are three

in number, and only three, not because we have arbitrarily brought

the various theories of life together under these three heads, but

because all men’s actions are always based on one of these three

views of life—because we cannot view life otherwise than in these

three ways.

 

These three views of life are as follows: First, embracing the

individual, or the animal view of life; second, embracing the

society, or the pagan view of life; third, embracing the whole

world, or the divine view of life.

 

In the first theory of life a man’s life is limited to his one

individuality; the aim of life is the satisfaction of the will of

this individuality. In the second theory of life a man’s life is

limited not to his own individuality, but to certain societies and

classes of individuals: to the tribe, the family, the clan, the

nation; the aim of life is limited to the satisfaction of the will

of those associations of individuals. In the third theory of life

a man’s life is limited not to societies and classes of

individuals, but extends to the principle and source of life—to

God.

 

These three conceptions of life form the foundation of all the

religious that exist or have existed.

 

The savage recognizes life only in himself and his personal

desires. His interest in life is concentrated on himself alone.

The highest happiness for him is the fullest satisfaction of his

desires. The motive power of his life is personal enjoyment. His

religion consists in propitiating his deity and in worshiping his

gods, whom he imagines as persons living only for their personal

aims.

 

The civilized pagan recognizes life not in himself alone, but in

societies of men—in the tribe, the clan, the family, the kingdom

—and sacrifices his personal good for these societies. The

motive power of his life is glory. His religion consists in the

exaltation of the glory of those who are allied to him—the

founders of his family, his ancestors, his rulers—and in

worshiping gods who are exclusively protectors of his clan, his

family, his nation, his government [see Footnote].

 

[Footnote: The fact that so many varied forms of

existence, as the life of the family, of the tribe,

of the clan, of the state, and even the life of

humanity theoretically conceived by the Positivists,

are founded on this social or pagan theory of life,

does not destroy the unity of this theory of life.

All these varied forms of life are founded on the

same conception, that the life of the individual is

not a sufficient aim of life—that the meaning of

life can be found only in societies of individuals.

 

The man who holds the divine theory of life recognizes life not in

his own individuality, and not in societies of individualities (in

the family, the clan, the nation, the tribe, or the government),

but in the eternal undying source of life—in God; and to fulfill

the will of God he is ready to sacrifice his individual and family

and social welfare. The motor power of his life is love. And his

religion is the worship in deed and in truth of the principle of

the whole—God.

 

The whole historic existence of mankind is nothing else than the

gradual transition from the personal, animal conception of life to

the social conception of life, and from the social conception of

life to the divine conception of life. The whole history of the

ancient peoples, lasting through thousands of years and ending

with the history of Rome, is the history of the transition from

the animal, personal view of life to the social view of life. The

whole of history from the time of the Roman Empire and the

appearance of Christianity is the history of the transition,

through which we are still passing now, from the social view of

life to the divine view of life.

 

This view of life is the last, and founded upon it is the

Christian teaching, which is a guide for the whole of our life and

lies at the root of all our activity, practical and theoretic.

Yet men of what is falsely called science, pseudo-scientific men,

looking at it only in its externals, regard it as something

outgrown and having no value for us.

 

Reducing it to its dogmatic side only—to the doctrines of the

Trinity, the redemption, the miracles, the Church, the sacraments,

and so on—men of science regard it as only one of an immense

number of religions which have arisen among mankind, and now, they

say, having played out its part in history, it is outliving its

own age and fading away before the light of science and of true

enlightenment.

 

We come here upon what, in a large proportion of case, forms the

source of the grossest errors of mankind. Men on a lower level of

understanding, when brought into contact with phenomena of a

higher order, instead of making efforts to understand them, to

raise themselves up to the point of view from which they must look

at the subject, judge it from their lower standpoint, and the less

they understand what they are talking about, the more confidently

and unhesitatingly they pass judgment on it.

 

To the majority of learned then, looking at the living, moral

teaching of Christ from the lower standpoint of the conception of

life, this doctrine appears as nothing but very indefinite and

incongruous combination of Indian asceticism, Stoic and

Neoplatonic philosophy, and insubstantial anti-social visions,

which have no serious significance for our times. Its whole

meaning is concentrated for them in its external manifestations—

in Catholicism, Protestantism, in certain dogmas, or in the

conflict with the temporal power. Estimating the value of

Christianity by these phenomena is like a deaf man’s judging of

the character and quality of music by seeing the movements of the

musicians.

 

The result of this is that all these scientific men, from Kant,

Strauss, Spencer, and Renan down, do not understand the meaning of

Christ’s